Before she married the two had exchanged love poems, and on his return from exile, Locke moved into Lady Damaris and her husband’s household.

In 1666 Locke met the parliamentarian Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury.

The two struck up a friendship that blossomed into full patronage, and a year later Locke was appointed physician to Shaftesbury’s household.Locke would follow his patron into exile a year later, returning only after the Glorious Revolution had placed the Protestant William III on the throne.During his decades of service to Shaftesbury, John Locke had been writing.That year he supervised a dangerous liver operation on Shaftesbury that likely saved his patron’s life.For the next two decades, Locke’s fortunes were tied to Shaftesbury, who was first a leading minister to Charles II and then a founder of the opposing Whig party.To Locke, knowledge was not the discovery of anything either innate or outside of the individual, but simply the accumulation of “facts” derived from sensory experience.